The State of JavaScript 2025 survey results are in this week, and there’s some givens and some surprises this year. Givens: Vite's still a favorites and devs want more native TS features. Surprises: ChatGPT usage declined, no one’s using Windsurf, and Bun is the third most-used JS runtime. And thanks for making us the most written-in podcast of the survey! We appreciate it!

An 8 month study conducted by the Harvard Business Review reports AI tools don’t shrink work for employees, they actually intensify it. Employees work faster, take on more tasks, and work longer hours, which can lead to burnout, cognitive fatigue, and lower quality work over time. 

And there’s yet another new React2Shell flaw that’s being exploited by the ILOVEPOOP toolkit to scan and target vulnerable Next.js and RSC environments. Patch your React apps, folks.

Timestamps:

• 0:59 - State of JS survey results
• 23:53 - Harvard Business Review’s report on how AI is changing work
• 35:30 - React2Shell exploits and ILOVEPOOP
• 40:08 - The largest domain name purchase ever
• 43:00 - Adobe Acrobat can turn PDFs into podcasts
• 46:48 - We hit 100k downloads!
• 47:55 - What’s making us happy

News:

• Paige - State of JavaScript survey results 2025
• Jack - React2Shell exploits
• TJ - HBR reports AI didn’t shrink work for employees, it intensified it and the burnout is getting real

Lightning News: 

• Thanks for helping us reach 100k downloads!
• The largest publicly disclosed domain name purchase ever
• Adobe Acrobat can turn PDFs into podcasts

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - San Diego Zoo Safari Park
• Jack - Bambu Lab H2C
• TJ - Ubuntu OS

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

Malicious code is making its way into VS Code extensions this week, as two Chinese-based AI coding assistants are identified as capturing every file on a user’s computer and sending it to servers in China without their knowledge or consent. Please just be cautious about what you’re installing on your machines, folks.

In related news, the Deno team has introduced Deno sandboxes to create and deploy secure, isolated VMs in the cloud. Strict permissions, network policies, directories, and isolated secrets—make these sandboxes great for AI agents, or any other dynamic workload where speed and security are paramount.

And the software going viral this week is OpenClaw (aka Clawdbot aka Moltbot), which is an open source, autonomous AI agent that runs locally on a user’s machine. OpenClaw can connect to LLMs and perform tasks like managing emails, scheduling, reorganizing local files or other daily tasks, and is designed to be proactive rather than just reacting to prompts. It’s truly the Wild West giving an AI agent access to read all the files on a machine or respond to emails on its own, so be careful out there, folks.

Timestamps:

• 1:07 - VS Code AI plugins are stealing data
• 10:47 - Deno sandboxes
• 16:09 - OpenClaw
• 43:41 - More Gemini features are coming to Chrome
• 45:33 - Apple containers
• 46:44 - What’s making us happy

News:

• Paige - VS Code AI plugins are stealing all the data of users computers (silently)
• Jack - Deno sandboxes
• TJ - OpenClaw (aka Clawdbot aka Moltbot) and our lack of trust for AI agents

Lightning News: 

• More Gemini features are coming to Chrome
• Apple Containers

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Claude Code
• Jack - Sneakers movie
• TJ - Firefox browser

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

You heard it here first, folks, RSC support is now available in TanStack Start! Since TanStack Start supports not only React but also Solid, it handles serialization differently, meaning the critical security vulnerabilities RSC-enabled React apps have been suffering from lately won’t affect TanStack apps.

Yarn 6 was recently announced, and (surprise, surprise) it’s going to be ported to Rust. Get ready for blazing fast installs, the ability to easily switch between Yarn versions, and lazy installs to silently keep dependency versions in sync with the package.json. 

Also on the Rust bandwagon is the VoidZero team with Rolldown 1.0 RC. Rolldown is the bundler successor to Rollup, and boasts 10-30x faster speeds than Rollup while maintaining API plugin compatibility, built-in transforms, and native CJS/ESM interoperability. All hail the perf gains of JS tools written in Rust.

Timestamps:

• 1:20 - TanStack Start RSC
• 4:15 - Yarn 6 and Rust
• 12:03 - Rolldown 1.0 RC
• 16:38 - More RSC CVEs
• 23:19 - Mozilla is building an AI “rebel alliance”
• 30:05 - What’s making us happy

News:

• Paige - Rolldown 1.0 RC
• Jack - TanStack Start RSC
• TJ - Yarn 6 and Rust

Lightning News: 

• Another day, another RSC CVE
• Mozilla’s building an AI “rebel alliance”

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Landman season 2
• Jack - Vaseline
• TJ - ChatGPT continuing to help me around the house

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

jQuery is the JavaScript library that just won’t quit. 20 years after its inception the team released jQuery 4.0.0, and it brings some notable modernizations including removed support for IE 10, a migration to ES modules, and support for Trusted Types. 

Node.js creator Ryan Dahl declared earlier this week that “the era of humans writing code is over”, and considering how good AI coding agents have gotten lately, he’s probably not wrong. 

Cloudflare also announces it has acquired popular JavaScript framework Astro. Cloudflare has been a good steward to other OSS projects in the past, and this acquisition allows the Astro team to focus on making the framework even better.

Timestamps:

• 0:50 - jQuery 4.0
• 7:58 - Is the era of humans writing code over?
• 18:23 - Cloudflare acquires Astro
• 24:54 - Vertical tabs are coming to Chrome
• 29:37 - Apple is going to use Gemini for Siri
• 43:07 - What’s making us happy

News:

• Paige - Ryan Dahl declares humans writing code is over
• Jack - Cloudflare acquires Astro
• TJ - jQuery 4.0

Lightning News: 

• Chrome adds support for vertical tabs
• Apple and Google enter agreement to use Gemini for Apple Intelligence

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Onyx Storm book
• Jack - Learning to play Born to Run on guitar
• TJ - Only Murders in the Building TV series and Dungeon Crawler Carl book series

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

A new year, a new tactic to stem the flow of npm supply chain attacks. This time, the proposal is for “Staged Publishing” which introduces a review window that a package owner must approve before a package release becomes publicly available.

Vercel Labs is out with a new AI tool called json-render that lets users generate dashboards, widgets, apps, and data visualizations from prompts, and constrains the response to JSON for only components pre-defined by the user.

Finally, The Simpsons character Ralph Wiggum is the biggest thing in AI coding recently. Ralph is an AI development pattern using a while loop (like a bash script) to repeatedly run an AI agent on the same task, feeding its output back as context, and forcing it to iterate until a specific completion promise is met, rather than letting the AI stop prematurely. Interesting? Yes! Useful in practice? Still tbd.

Chapter Markers:

• 1:04 - npm to implement staged publishing
• 8:16 - Vercel’s json-render
• 16:13 - Ralph Wiggum loops
• 30:53 - Claude Code tips
• 33:52 - Firefox 147 and anchor positioning
• 35:42 - Fire starter
• 39:40 - What’s making us happy

News:

• Paige - npm to implement Staged Publishing
• Jack - Vercel Labs’ json-render
• TJ - Ralph Wiggum loops

Lightning News: 

• Firefox 147 and anchor positioning

Fire Starters:

• CSS @container scroll-state()

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Rolife Book Nook Garden House miniature
• Jack - Blade Runner live at the symphony
• TJ - Coffee advent calendars

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

We’re back with our first episode of 2026, and prominent software developer and YouTuber, Theo Browne, made waves recently when he announced he’d migrated his T3 Chat app from the Next.js framework to TanStack Start. It isn’t that Next.js is bad, but that the requirements of T3 Chat were better supported by TanStack Start’s architecture, and Theo breaks down his evaluation process to reach that decision.

For the 10th year in a row, the JavaScript Rising Stars report drops, and the most popular projects (by GitHub stars) for the year include n8n (a workflow automation platform), react-bits (gorgeous animated React components), shadcn/ui (more UI components), and Excalidraw (virtual whiteboard for sketching and diagramming).

In less stellar news, the creator of the wildly popular CSS library Tailwind announced he’s had to lay off 75% of his engineering team because AI has killed traffic to its website (and by association, Tailwind’s commercial products that drive revenue). It was hard enough before the rise of AI for OSS to get funding, and this is just another cautionary tale that we need to support the people building the tools and products so many of us use every day in our jobs.

Timestamps:

• 1:54 - Theo moves off Next.js and resulting buzz
• 11:32 - A look at the 2025 JS rising stars
• 23:25 - Is AI hurting Tailwind?
• 31:03 - Lego smart bricks
• 35:45 - What’s making us happy 

News:

• Paige - Is AI killing OSS now? Tailwind thinks so
• Jack - Theo moved off Next.js to TanStack Start and the internet is buzzing 
• TJ - 2025 rising stars

Lightning News: 

• Lego smart bricks

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Flip-It! Bottle emptying caps
• Jack - Miami Hurricanes football team 
• TJ - New Pokemon GO features

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

It’s that time of year again: the holidays are nearly upon us and 2026 is fast approaching, so it’s time for our year end holiday spectacular! This year our past predictions for the future of web development come back to haunt us, we make some bold new proclamations for what’s in store for 2026, and of course, share what’s made us happy this year.

Our past predictions were pretty hit or miss. Although a surge in popularity for simpler frontend frameworks like SolidJS and a whole slew of new web APIs didn’t appear (as Jack and Paige predicted), AI agents evolving to be capable of implementing whole new features and debugging bigger problems in code was spot on (point goes to TJ).

Predictions for 2026? With the continued popularity of AI for coding, TJ believes we’ll treat HTML more like assembly code. Paige predicts an uptick in Internet outages and supply chain attacks, and more scrutiny of if AI features are really as valuable as we’ve been led to believe. Jack feels this is the year SolidJS takes off, and “code mode” for AI agents is going to add even more value than the creation of MCP servers last year.

Just like last year, the things that made us happiest are pretty simple: maintaining consistent routines like exercising, reading books, and stepping away from the keyboard. And using the tools often used for work for fun, creative projects like a homemade fanfiction audiobook.

And as always, thank you, Front-end Fire listeners! We wouldn’t be here without you, and we’ve enjoyed getting to know many of you more over the past year. Wishing you a wonderful holiday season, and we’ll be back in 2026 with more frontend goodness.

Timestamps:

• 2:36 - Revisiting old predictions
• 18:01 - 2026 predictions
• 39:26 - What’s making us happy

2024 Predictions Revisited:

• Paige - New web APIs
• Jack - A return to simplicity in coding frameworks
• TJ - AI agents solving bigger coding problems

2026 Predictions: 

• Paige - More tech attacks and less AI hype, more AI scrutiny
• Jack - SolidJS 2.0 and “code mode” is going to unlock even more AI agent functionality
• TJ - We start treating HTML like assembly code

What Makes Us Happy this Year:

• Paige - Consistent routines (as boring as that sounds): regular exercise, regularly practicing hobbies and reading books 
• Jack - Descript and Claude for a homemade fanfic audiobook
• TJ - Reading books

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

Hot on the heels of the first critical vulnerability discovered in React applications using RSCs last week, two more vulnerabilities have surfaced, which is not uncommon. Even if you already updated for the critical vulnerability, you will need to update again.

In lighter news, Anthropic donates MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation, just one year after introducing it to the world. MCP’s rise has been meteoric: 10,000 active public MCP servers, adoption by ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, VS Code, and more, and now stewardship by the AAIF, which is under the Linux Foundation.

With all the great things coming to CSS lately, the Chrome Dev team created a great CSS Wrapped write up highlighting the big features for 2025. Of the 22 new features added, invoker commands, popover enhancements, and customizable select dropdowns are some of the most exciting additions.

Timestamps:

• 2:29 - More vulnerabilities in RSCs
• 6:36 - Anthropic donates MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation
• 16:04 - CSS 2025 wrap up
• 25:05 - Disney to allow characters on Sora
• 29:42 - What’s making us happy

News:

• Paige - Anthropic donates MCP to the Agentic AI Foundation
• Jack - More vulnerabilities in RSCs discovered
• TJ - CSS Wrapped 2025

Lightning News: 

• Disney will allow characters on Sora AI video generator

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Twinkly Christmas Lights
• Jack - 3D printed underwear for the multiboard desk organization
• TJ - Mammoth

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

This week TanStack joins the AI wars with the alpha release of TanStack AI: an open-source AI SDK with a unified interface across multiple providers. TanStack AI is an open-source ecosystem of libraries and standards, and it is client, server, and AI provider agnostic, to make building AI-enabled apps accessible to all.

In a surprise move, AI company Anthropic acquires JavaScript runtime Bun to accelerate its development of Claude Code. Apparently, Bun has been central to Claude Code reaching $1 billion in run-rate revenue in just six months, and Anthropic’s brought the team in house to keep the momentum going.

And it’s been another rough week for security in JavaScript. First, a new self-replicating, credential stealing malware attack, dubbed Shai-Hulud 2.0, swept the npm ecosystem and compromised 800 npm packages in the process, and then a critical security vulnerability was discovered for any React projects using React Server Components. Just remember to lock down your dependencies and install those patches ASAP, folks.

Timestamps:

• 1:22 - TanStack AI
• 9:12 - Anthropic buys Bun
• 21:03 - Shai-Hulul 2.0 on npm and an RSC vulnerability
• 30:23 - What’s making us happy

News:

• Paige - Shai-Hulud 2.0 on npm and RSC vulnerability
• Jack - TanStack AI
• TJ - Anthropic buys Bun (Bun post) (Anthropic post)

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - The Durrells TV series
• Jack - Essentialism book
• TJ - Dungeon Crawler Carl book series

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast

Another week, another new AI IDE. This week, Google released the Antigravity IDE (yet another VS Code fork) which offers unique twists like “cross-surface” agents, user feedback to agent-generated artifacts, and a view of all agents across any workspace.

The team behind the Unistyles cross-platform library just debuted Uniwind for all the React Native devs who want to use Tailwind styling in their native apps. Uniwind brings Tailwind-style className support to RN at build time, and has a custom, high-performance CSS parser to handle both Tailwind 4 and plain CSS files. 

Prisma 7.0 is out, and so is Rust from its codebase. The team completely rebuilt it in TypeScript to cut down on its bundle size and the communication layer between Rust and the JS runtime that was actually slower than just JavaScript through and through.

In Lightning News, even if you don’t develop in Angular, the Angular v21 dev release video is worth a watch, Cloudflare had a big Internet outage this week, Firefox has teased AI in its browser “the Firefox way”, and the State of React Survey 2025 is open now (please vote for Front-end Fire in the Podcasts section!).

Timestamps:

• 1:27 - Prisma 7.0
• 9:35 - Uniwind
• 12:18 - Antigravity
• 27:32 - Angular v21 release video
• 29:20 - Cloudflare outage
• 37:11 - Firefox gets an AI window
• 38:47 - State of React survey open
• 40:36 - What’s making us happy

News:

• Paige - Uniwind
• Jack - Prisma 7.0
• TJ - Antigravity

Lightning News:

• Firefox gets an AI window
• Cloudflare had a big outage
• The State of React Survey 2025 is now open
• Angular v21 Dev Release video

What Makes Us Happy this Week:

• Paige - Upcoming holidays and seeing family
• Jack - StroboClip HD for the guitar
• TJ - Dungeon Crawler Carl book

Thanks as always to our sponsor, the Blue Collar Coder channel on YouTube. You can join us in our Discord channel, explore our website and reach us via email, or talk to us on X, Bluesky, or YouTube.

• Front-end Fire website
• Blue Collar Coder on YouTube
• Blue Collar Coder on Discord
• Reach out via email
• Tweet at us on X @front_end_fire
• Follow us on Bluesky @front-end-fire.com
• Subscribe to our YouTube channel @Front-EndFirePodcast